Chapel Noir (40 page)

“You do not want to slay before the eyes of one of God’s servants,” Mr. Holmes said.

A silence. “God’s servants, if they be true, are all down on whores.”

We four remained silent, the expression “down on whores” from the supposed Jack the Ripper letters echoing in our pounding ears.

I could hear my blood pulsing, as if eager to escape my skin under the quick glide of the upholsterer’s knife.

I put a hand to my left ear to try to shut out that incessant thunder in my veins.

The edge of steel at my throat, thin as a violin string, pressed harder.

Sherlock Holmes was only three steps away. Irene five. Elizabeth ten. They might as well have all been in Afghanistan.

And then I realized that I must be my own salvation.

“All greedy, lying whores must die,” the madman Kelly was intoning in my right ear.

I moved the fingers clapping the left side of my head delicately, as if penetrating a sewing basket filled with naked pins and needles.

Practicing the domestic arts develops a fine touch. Blindly, I withdrew the jet head of a hatpin and struck the long steel tine at the rough hand resting where my neck joined my shoulder.

Kelly yowled as three forms converged on us like leaping hounds, and I let myself slide to the floor.

I was not too proud to scrabble away from the fray on hands on knees, despite the filthy condition of the floor.

When I looked up, Sherlock Holmes had wrestled Kelly into firm custody. For a gaunt man he seemed to possess incredible strength. But more than Mr. Holmes was responsible for Kelly’s sudden absence of struggle. Irene stood beside him, her pistol barrel pressed against his temple. Even a madmen recognized the futility of arguing with that.

Mr. Holmes slung him back to the stool like a bag of coal.

“Now, my son,” he said sternly, “you will answer my questions with no further outbursts, and ignore these women. Do you not recall that in the er, Good Book, sometimes, ah, angels appear in unlikely forms.”

I could tell that Mr. Sherlock Holmes was only familiar with the Bible and the usages of the Christian religion in the vaguest of terms.

Kelly’s eyes narrowed in calculation. “I see. This is a test. I am to prove myself fit to follow in the Master’s footsteps by heeding his priest, no matter what temptations surround me.”

He folded his arms and straightened his shoulders. “Yes. I will prove my ability to resist these devils, which you say are angels in disguise.”

“Excellent.” Mr. Holmes again paused. “You have worked on an elaborate article of furniture for Durand Frères?”

Kelly squirmed on his stool. “A piece of angel’s work for the acts of the devil, but I did not know its purpose until I accompanied it to the house of sin and shame.”

“Of course you did not,” Mr. Holmes soothed the fellow, as if he were indeed a clergyman. “You were the innocent tool. But once there, and once you had realized—”

“I left, Father. As soon as I could.”

“You did not dally on the premises?”

“Dally? Who’d want the likes of me at such a place?”

“You did not visit the house’s wine cellar?”

Kelly’s expression hardened, either with distaste or the effort of appearing not to lie. “Wine? I like my pints too well, I admit, but wine is for the Master and the Mass, not the sort of doings that go on in a place like that. Not for the likes of me.”

“So you claim that you left the house as soon as the . . . lounge was delivered?”

“I am a workman, Father. I do the job and then go.”

It was not lost upon me that Kelly might consider the elimination of fallen women an occupation or even a calling.

“Hmmm,” said Mr. Holmes, with as much skepticism as I felt. “Now you must tell me what your mission from God is, and how you have gone about it.”

Had we not been three, with a celebrated detective between us and him, I am sure none of us would have remained in the chamber with him for the next outpouring. Well, I wouldn’t have at any rate, not after endless moments in his homicidal embrace. To judge by the fascinated expressions on Irene’s and Elizabeth’s faces, fear was the least emotion they were feeling, though my skin crawled as if the man’s vitriolic hatred were poisonous spittle that was sprinkling my physical person as well as my senses.

His theme was simple. Women were conniving, vicious, diseased beings who wanted his money and forced him into unwanted relations. God had given him a mission to stop them for the sake of good men everywhere, and when he found an opportunity, he did. He related a horrific number of attacks, but his accounts were so disjointed and confused that it would take hours and hours of questioning to sort out what was true and what a jumble, and he really admitted nothing when it came to the London horrors, although he seemed very familiar with them. But then, what Whitechapel resident would not be?

During this inconclusive recital, I began to see why the London press had assumed the Ripper would soon be dead or confined to an insane asylum.

Obviously a formal and longer interrogation was needed. We remained in Kelly’s miserable room while Sherlock Holmes delivered the resident to Inspector le Villard and two gendarmes in the street below.

No curtains concealed the window, but Irene flattened herself against the adjacent wall, dingy as it was, and peered down into the street.

“Is that it?” Elizabeth asked breathlessly of no one in particular. “We have witnessed the capture of Jack the Ripper?”

“It would seem so,” Irene said. She glanced pointedly at Elizabeth. “But it would be premature to make any announcements to the public.”

“And that is . . . was Sherlock Holmes himself?”

“Not quite himself.”

“I should like to meet him.”

The words were barely out of her mouth when the narrow door to the chamber creaked open to reveal the tall form of the French priest.

We all turned, then converged on him. Perhaps he had absorbed some of Kelly’s mania, for he seemed taken aback, and drew away.

“Is he arrested?” Irene wanted to know.

“Is he the Ripper?” Elizabeth demanded.

“Is he mad?” I piped in.

He ignored our questions to present his own. “I recognize the marshal-general tendencies of Madam Irene Adler Norton,” he said with a flicking glance at her. “But I cannot discern which fair flower of French womanhood is Miss Nell Huxleigh, and which is Miss Pink from the rue des Moulins.”

Elizabeth and I exchanged glances, our gazes resting of the same overprinted female visage. We could have been Siamese twins, and smiled at each other, pleased to have confounded Sherlock Holmes in one small respect.

We extended our hands until they clasped, smiled, and turned to face Sherlock Holmes as one.

“Ha!” A long accusing forefinger isolated me. “I told you our habits betray us, Miss Huxleigh. Now that the lunatic and his howlings are removed from the scene, I hear the unmistakable clink of a pocket chatelaine.”

I thrust a hand between the folds of my skirt and deep into the concealed pocket without thinking.

“Thank you.” He turned and bowed to Elizabeth. “I have not seen Miss Pink in a week, but must say that she looked far better as a true rather than a false courtesan. It was a pity you knew so little of the murderous incident when first interviewed there. Perhaps you know a bit more now.” He glanced to Irene. “You are both American. Is that as far as the acquaintance goes?”

“So far,” Irene said. “You haven’t answered our questions.”

“You will excuse me,” he said. “I do not wish to visit the quarters of the Sûreté in my present guise.”

He strode to the closed windows and used the reflective surface of one long pane as a mirror while he literally peeled the likeness of the French priest from his features.

Irene was too much at home in the theater to regard the act of removing makeup as an excuse for silence.

She went to hover behind his shoulder like a ghost in the impromptu mirror.

“Kelly was one of the London police’s suspects,” she declared.

“Indeed. They were most interested in Mr. Kelly, especially when he disappeared right after Mary Jane Kelly’s gruesome death. The police became intrigued by his movements, but they had lost him. I did not, finally determining he had walked eighty miles to Dover before taking ship to Dieppe. Since there were other candidates more likely, I pursued them. All such suspects proved unsatisfactory for one reason or another, which is why the official police conclusion is that Jack the Ripper was one Montague John Druitt, a barrister and schoolmaster, quite mad, whose body conveniently surfaced in the Thames on the very last day of 1888, December 31. He was judged to have been waterborne for at least a month. His own family had suspected him of the crimes, for he had long been known to be what is called ‘sexually insane.’ ”

“And you think that Druitt—?” Irene asked.

“Was convenient and dead. That is all.” He had by now removed the putty that had enlarged his honest English hawk nose into something that would have plunged Cyrano de Bergerac into even greater despair, the bushy white eyebrows, and head of hair.

Emerging from the imposing clerical guise with his natural dark hair sleeked back, he resembled some clever bird-beaked otter. When he began undoing the long row of cassock buttons that ran from neck to hem as if strange women were not in the room, I looked away.

After no gasps emerged from Irene or Elizabeth, who were made of sterner stuff, I looked back. His street dress had fit under the encompassing black garment. It took him only moments to straighten his cuffs and tie, then fold the cassock into the same Gladstone bag I had seen him carry earlier.

“Mustn’t keep the constabulary of any land waiting unduly,” he announced, the persona of the French priest now totally in the bag. He turned from his makeshift mirror to face us with satisfaction.

“For your information, ladies, there were two other leading candidates in the London police’s estimation, which I found fairly unlikely. One was Kosminsky, a Polish Jew who hated women, particularly prostitutes. The other was Michael Ostrog, a Russian doctor and also a convict, always an intriguing combination in the history of crime. I have long told Watson that a doctor who turns to crime is liable to commit the most fiendish offenses. I believe that once one has abandoned the Hippocratic oath, there is no holding him back.”

“What made Ostrog a suspect?” Irene asked.

“Why, he was a homicidal maniac, known to carry surgical knives. And he was cruel to women. I must give the police credit for turning up an admirable number of these misfits, but I believe all these men were more legitimate candidates for the lunatic asylum than the gallows. You see that even such a known murderer as Kelly escaped the gallows for the asylum. Luckily, his escape has ended here, and so, we hope, has the career of Jack the Ripper.”

He retrieved a top hat from the bag, donned it, and went to the door like a doctor bidding a healed patient adieu.

“I think that you all may consider your meddlings over. Kelly is a demented man already convicted of murder once. He may not ever see trial in England for such crimes, but he is sure to be incarcerated in a French madhouse. The Ripper furor has abated in London, the murders in France have been successfully underplayed, and it is now best to let sleeping mad dogs die.

“I do not approve of your efforts in this matter,” he added, “but concede that your appearance and presence today was useful in upsetting the suspect and thus revealing his manias. So, in this instance, you have been of accidental aid. I believe that such worldly ladies can find your way back to the Hotel du Louvre without escort, and bid you good-bye.”

He stood aside in the hall, so that we could exit through the open door.

Elizabeth was the first to leave. “I should like to speak with you more someday, Mr. Holmes.”

“That is extremely unlikely, Miss Pink.”

I went next and said nothing.

“I suggest French and possibly geography lessons,” he said acidly. “There is a rue Capron but there is no Durant firm of cabinetmakers there, which I soon found out.”

Mortified, I skittered into the hall.

Irene came last and paused before him, chin lifted to put her face in whatever dim light seeped into the passage from the uncurtained window through which a madman had leaped to the street not two hours before.

“We were of more than accidental help, Mr. Holmes, which I think you will realize before much time has passed. You may call upon us at the Hotel du Louvre when you are so inclined.”

He gazed down at her for a moment. For that one moment I thought he would speak sense instead of superiority, but I was wrong. “Alas, I fear events will not make such a social call possible or necessary. I will return to England soon.”

“Oh, it will not be a social call, I fear. I hope that you are as good at anticipating the worst as you are at divining the past.” Irene smiled and sailed past him like a ship of the line.

We all clattered down the stairs, past the still-bemused concierge and into the Paris streets.

38.
A Message from Abroad

I think had there been any alternative I should have taken,
it instead of prosecuting that unknown night journey
.
—
JONATHAN HARKER’S JOURNAL,
DRACULA

We returned to our rooms at the Hotel du Louvre by the same back stairs from which we had left them.

I believe we passed even the same footman and maid we encountered when we had departed.

We were as taken for granted as before, which was rather disappointing. Looking like a sinner was less exciting than I had thought.

Once the door to our suite had shut on us, we all threw ourselves down on the nearest couch, chair, or—in Elizabeth’s case—empty area of carpeting.

“So then he is captured!” Elizabeth leaned back on her elbows, the very image of a hoyden, were one ever made up like a harlot. “There is something about him, something about his name that tickles my memory. But it is gone.”

“I felt the same way when we were at the cabinetmaker’s,” I said. “It is indeed suspicious that he left England just after Mary Jane Kelly’s murder. Wait! What about this notorious Madam Kelly? Isn’t Mary Jane Kelly the one who had claimed a gentleman had taken her to Paris once? Perhaps she is a relative of Madam Kelly.”

“Kelly, as we can see, is as common a name as Smith nowadays,” Irene said.

“Especially,” Elizabeth added dourly, “since the famine in Ireland forced Kellys and O’Connors and everybody Irish from their homeland.”

“Really, Pink,” Irene said, amused. “I cannot decide if you are more indignant about the stamping out of the Irish, the buffalo, or the fallen woman.”

“I am equally outraged by all such acts of extermination,” she said.

Their exchange, which made little sense to me, especially the part about the buffalo, had at least allowed me to think.

“Now I have it. James Kelly was married, and his first overt crime was against his wife. Perhaps he was no stranger to escaping to Paris, and perhaps he had taken one of the Whitechapel prostitutes he despised to Paris, because she shared his last name, and it was as if they were a man and wife on a honeymoon. After all, Irene, Godfrey took you to Paris for a honeymoon.”

“Godfrey has nothing in common with James Kelly,” she said sternly, “but that is a very good point, Nell. It might explain a good deal about the progress of the Ripper’s crimes, and why they ended abruptly after the savage death of Mary Jane Kelly.”

Elizabeth gazed at me with something resembling awe. “Good work, Nell! Of course. He may have killed the other women as he wandered the Whitechapel streets attempting to meet up with Mary Jane Kelly again. In some strange way she was the mirror of his first crime: attacking his actual wife, Sarah. Only with Mary Jane Kelly, he could do all he had only begun to do to Sarah years before.”

“We have gone to all this trouble to find and confront that miserable little man,” I complained, “and Sherlock Holmes will get all the credit.”

Irene had stripped off her gloves and was untying her heavy taffeta bonnet ribbons.
“Mais certainement
. Sherlock Holmes will get all the credit.”

“Where would he have been,” I inquired indignantly, “if we had not been there to cow the suspect?”

“Yes,” Irene agreed pensively, leaning her chin on her hands, which were braced on her knees, “we were herded like sheep to the perimeter to keep the wolf at bay. Isn’t that the reverse of common practice? Usually the shepherdesses don’t repel the wolf, but the other way around.”

“We are rather lurid shepherdesses,” I put in. “Most repellent, really.”

“To such a man, yes,” Irene said. “Elizabeth, would you fetch our Krafft-Ebing from my room?”

“Oh, that awful book,” I complained, as Elizabeth jumped up and darted off with the energy of a twelve-year-old.

“You have not read it, Nell.”

“You have not let me read it, Irene, which is how I know it is an awful book.”

She looked beyond me to the desk. “What is that?”

I turned slowly to look over my shoulder, past the heavy fall of my undressed hair. Masquerading as a fallen woman was a wearying occupation.

A small white sort of pillow lay upon the desktop’s green-leather inset.

“A letter?” I suggested, squinting at it.

“Could you fetch it? It must have been delivered while we were gone.”

That is the problem with living in a hotel. People come in and do things while you are out. Of course, our own Sophie was no better.

I pushed myself upright and tottered to the desk. Irene’s thinsoled slippers had turned the bottoms of my feet into skates of fire.

“Godfrey’s hand!” I cried, thankful to see something familiar and welcome after our immersion into gruesome crime. “And many, many sheets.” I seized the brass letter opener and slashed open the flap. Three folded pages of thick foreign vellum practically sprung out. “You will want to read it right away, Irene.”

“No, Nell, you read it to me. I am too exhausted.”

I returned to my chair, withdrew my pince-nez from its silver case on the chatelaine in my pocket—betraying accessory that it was, but then someone’s
clay pipe
had been a clear clue in Whitechapel, too—and unfolded the heavy foreign paper with a sigh.

After all I had been through, holding Godfrey’s neat lawyerly script in my hands was a return to sanity.

“Dearest Irene—oh
, it may be too personal.”

She waved a weary hand. After a performance Irene often sank into an almost-drugged state of fatigue, when even holding her head up seemed too great a task.

“I don’t care, Nell.”

“
‘Dearest Irene’—oh, ‘and Nell
.’ There I am, in the parentheses. It is a joint letter after all.”

I read on. “ ‘My departure from Prague was so sudden that I had no time to inform you beforehand.’ ”

Irene stirred on the couch. “Departure?”

“ ‘Some trifling business that the Rothschilds found too pressing to ignore has been plunged into my hands. Hence I am on the train once more heading eastward into Hungary. I will be traveling as far east again as I have come thus far from the North Sea inland to Prague. I am writing a serial letter, as I do not know when I will be stopped long enough to post it, and as I am not even sure of my destination.

“ ‘Apparently these millions of acres between Prague and the Black Sea do not reckon locations and distances as precisely as in the more salubrious and civilized parts of Europe.’ ”

I paused to take breath.

“Poor Godfrey!” Irene exclaimed, hushing Elizabeth as she came rushing into the room with the dreadful book in her hand. Her nod indicated that Elizabeth should sit on the foot of her couch while I continued to read.

I, of course, was familiar with Godfrey’s hand from our work in the Temple together and declaimed smoothly with enough skill that Irene should not be ashamed of my performance.

“ ‘The first leg of the journey retraced our trip to Vienna, Irene.’ ” I squinted at the page and was forced to interrupt Godfrey’s text. “I believe there is a string of Austrian words. Or are they German? What do people speak in Vienna, anyway?”

“Love, music, and pastry,” Irene said, smiling nostalgically. “Don’t worry about translating that part. It probably describes . . . tortes. Not legal ones, edible ones.”

I resumed reading: “ ‘Our train track weaves near and then away from the broad blue thread of the Danube as if knitting into its curving course. Buda-Pesth is not as imperial a city as Vienna, though quite as picturesque. I am thankful that I have learned a smattering of German from you and from my visits to Bohemia. English is seldom heard as one ventures into the ancient land of the Turk and the Magyars.

“ ‘I will not follow the Danube into Bukovina and am not bound so near the Black Sea as Bessarabia. Instead, from Buda-Pesth, where I have time for lunch before the train leaves, my route will strike southeast through the Carpathian Mountains into Transylvania. One expects a quantity of wooded terrain from that name. It appears that I now venture farther east than even you, Irene, for Warsaw far to the north is still west of my destination. Were it not for the barrier of Bessarabia, I would soon be adjoining the Ukraine of Russia, imagine that.

“ ‘I am to call upon a provincial satrap or other. My train chugs into wooded hills between the Tisza and Mures rivers, with a town called Klausenburgh my goal, and from there, who knows what village? An agent of the Countess will meet me there to conduct me to the family seat. The train compartments are mostly empty. No one shares the space to disturb my writing, though the rocking of the train along the tracks gives my hand a slight palsy.

“ ‘It is reassuring as I forge deeper into forests and foreign territory to know that you and Nell are safe and amusing yourselves at Neuilly. You must not languish in the country, though, but take yourself into Paris to see the World Exposition, perhaps, and marvel at all the foreign displays. I do not doubt that you will be able to tour more interesting parts of the world in Paris these days than I will see on my entire long journey into the backwaters of Europe.’ ”

We ended up giggling like girls at Godfrey’s well-meant but wildly inappropriate visions for our current occupations.

“Is that all, Nell?” Irene asked after we had stopped laughing. The faint frown had returned.

“Only a postscript that he does not know when he will be able to post a letter after this Klausenburgh stop.”

“Why are the Rothschilds sending him into this primitive country?”

“Apparently it is such a trifling errand that he forgot to mention the point.”

“Trifling errands do not take people hundreds of miles from civilization.” Her fingertips rapped the tabletop beside the sofa, mimicking the sound of galloping horses. Perhaps she was playing an imaginary tarantella on her imaginary piano. “I will wire the Rothschild agent in Prague and ask why. And where. And when he will be back. For a barrister Godfrey was annoyingly vague on these crucial points.”

“He wrote in haste,” I pointed out in his defense.

“Why such haste to hie to nowhere on a trifling errand? I do not like it.” Her fingers drummed the scarf-swathed table again. “Any more than I like the fact that we were followed from the upholsterer’s lodgings.”

“Followed?” Elizabeth demanded, looking quite alarmed as she held the Krafft-Ebing book open on her knees like a schoolroom miss.

“Why do you think I proposed a detour through the street market?”

“You wanted new fabrics, as you said?” I asked, recalling Irene leading us on a lightning raid upon on the crowded stands. She had moved through the jumbled labyrinth with the random force of a whirlwind, tossing up lengths of cloth and leaving without settling on anything. We had emerged from the area like refugees from a foreign bazaar, empty-handed and breathless, and spun in such a totally different direction that we had to circle back the long way around to our hotel.

Oh.

“I wanted to glimpse our pursuer,” Irene was explaining to Elizabeth, “and to lose him.”

“Him?” Elizabeth asked, even more alarmed. “Perhaps Sherlock Holmes—”

“Why would he bother to follow us at this point? After all, he has James the Ripper in his grasp, doesn’t he? He forgot about us the moment he joined le Villard in his carriage to convey James Kelly to the Sûreté.”

“I don’t believe he had forgotten about you,” Elizabeth added slyly.

This charge startled Irene from her reverie. “Nonsense. You cannot view with silly girlish wishfulness a man who is made of mathematics and test tubes. He relishes a mind that will not kowtow easily to his cleverness, that is all.”

“But if that dreadful Kelly was maddened by our presence,” Elizabeth persisted politely, “Mr. Sherlock Holmes was made nervous. You must allow, Irene, that by the nature of my trade I have special knowledge of men of many temperaments.”

“Miss Pink!” I said, forgetting my resolve to eradicate that unsuitable name. “Boasting of the wisdom learned from severe moral failings is not accepted here.”